In her telling, Mr. Geithner responded this way: “The banks could manage only so many foreclosures at a time, and Treasury wanted to slow down the pace so the banks wouldn’t be overwhelmed. And this was where the new foreclosure program came in: It was just big enough to ‘foam the runway’ for them.”

The elites will get their way.

The modern day successors of the Boston Brahmins will absolutely beat America's Kulaks in the political arena. Today America's Kulak equivalents get morally delegitimized by our elites, showing that our Kulaks are no match for those elites. At best the Kulaks can delay some elite desire for several years while elite moral condemnation against the Kulaks steadily rises. Eventually the elites win.

Conservative members of America's middle class are tools of the Republicans. But progressives are even bigger tools of smarter elites. The progressives get manipulated to focus on issues they can beat their chests about (e.g. gay marriage, the evil of Vladimir Putin, the evil of Republicans) but which in no way threaten elite interests. They are allowed to get power that they can use to intimidate wrong thinkers. This gives them a feeling of power. But they have little impact on the lives of people with real power.

It makes sense that big money wins. A fairly small number of players can pretty cheaply (relative to what they have at stake) focus a lot of persuaders on an issue and make their points known repeatedly. As Elizabeth Warren learned, the insiders know they have it in their best interest to support each other. Therefore the financial predators can expect to get away with reprehensible business practices.

One of Ephanshade’s most striking findings was that excelling in certain types of completely mainstream high school activities actually reduced a student’s admission chances by 60–65 percent, apparently because teenagers with such interests were regarded with considerable disfavor by the sort of people employed in admissions; these were ROTC, 4-H Clubs, Future Farmers of America, and various similar organizations.87 Consider that these reported activities were totally mainstream, innocuous, and non-ideological, yet might easily get an applicant rejected, presumably for being cultural markers. When we recognize the overwhelmingly liberal orientation of nearly all our elite universities and the large communities of academics and administrators they employ, we can easily imagine what might become of any applicants who proudly proclaimed their successful leadership roles in an activity associated with conservative Christianity or rightwing politics as their extracurricular claim to fame.

The elite universities are immune to criticism from people who live in a rural farm town in American plains states. Wall Street is immune to criticism from these same people who the Ivy League clearly do not want in their schools.

So the elites will get their way. Then what? How does this play out in the next few decades? Our elites are for mass immigration. What I want to know: Can the elites maintain control as the lower classes keep growing in size? Or will populist Democrats find they are able to get elected without elite help? Or will poorly educated masses just be more easily manipulated by the elites? We could end up like Argentina. Maybe the elites will lose control to populists. Is this possible?

The centralization of wealth/power that has been the key to horizontal transmission between nations of peripatetic cultures -- most prominently Jews -- yields increasing social virulence to which African genes are relatively immune. High degrees of heterozygosity yields a higher degree of variance in phenotype which, in turn provides more population immunity as well as greater tendency toward inequality.

Ironically, though, Martin Luther King Jr. may well have been assassinated for, in his last book, promoting a race-blind citizen's dividend as the solution to inequality, rather than racial preferences. This is exactly the kind of Democratic populism that could have headed off the genocide of old America and unified the interests of black and white working class against mass immigration. But then what would the Southern "Poverty" Law Center tell their paranoid donors? No... MLK had to be killed. Ironically, his sacrifice has resulted in a quasi-religious fervor promoting the very racial hatred that groups like the SPLC and other racial rent-seekers profit from. Indeed, all of the politically correct quasi-theocracy has one basic object: lower wages and centralize wealth and power in the private and public rent-seekers respectively. Feminism? Double the labor supply. Multi-culturalism? Exponentiate the labor supply. Anti-racism? Tell the white working class to shut up about their interests like unions and immigration restriction, stop having children they can't afford and pay their taxes to support public sector rent-seeking groups to have children beholden to the managerial elite which are beholden, now, to an African President. Was MLK's assassination -- even if carried out by the likes of the SPLC/ADL -- a group evolutionary strategy of African genes dominating the culture?

Conservative members of America's middle class are tools of the Republicans. But progressives are even bigger tools of smarter elites. The progressives get manipulated to focus on issues they can beat their chests about (e.g. gay marriage, the evil of Vladimir Putin, the evil of Republicans) but which in no way threaten elite interests. They are allowed to get power that they can use to intimidate wrong thinkers. This gives them a feeling of power. But they have little impact on the lives of people with real power.

Wow, what a gem Randall. That's probably the smartest piece I have read all week. That's why I became so disillusioned with liberal progressivism and liberal democracy.

I suspect the Brown masses will get tired of being ruled over by the current White and Jewish elite, so someday, populism will take off.

This may come sooner than we think. I seriously doubt the majority of Dems want the Old White Woman named Hillary Clinton to be the nominee. We may be ready for a string of Obamas now. While the current President is a tool of the elites, future Obamas will want power on their own terms.

When that happens, Whites (who will still be numerous) may demand their own leadership. Of course, if that happened, things would truly spiral out of control for the elites.

"The countries in Africa had the highest pre-tax Gini coefficients in 2008–2009, with South Africa the world's highest at 0.7."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

African genes dominate via extended phenotypics. All of the "shrewd" among us who think they're being oh-so-clever in centralizing wealth and power, while importing African genes, are as clueless as the suicidal crickets and zombie cockroaches: They're merely harvesting the honey like busy little bees on behalf of their African extended phenotypic puppet masters.